Andy Petrella is first and foremost a Belgian mathematician who tried to find a way to apply his skills to the concrete world. One of them was programming. So, after graduating in Mathematics, he continued his study in Informatics at the University of Liege.He quickly became interested in Geomatics because of the heterogeneous needs of this discipline, which led him to mainly work in the GIS field. Over there, he got the opportunity to sharpen his skills on distributed architecture for interoperable solutions.After spending time developing in Java and integrating scripting languages such as Python and JavaScript, he slowly moved back to functional programming. Although working with JVM was a constraint, he tried his hand at Scala and took the opportunity to use Play! 2 while it was still in development.Having found a new way to enjoy mathematics along with programming, he joined one of his friends and they decided to create NextLab (http://www.nextlab.be/), a company that offers the perfect context to push Play! 2 and Scala to the foreground through projects and customers.Andy also loves to share his experiences, his enjoyment, and his discoveries through the co-creation of a user group called WAJUG (http://wajug.be/) dedicated to help Walloons to meet together and share ideas about information technology. In order to ensure a constant flow of information, he also writes his thoughts on his blog, SKA LA (http://ska-la.blogspot.be/).
